Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Barna da Siena
Sienese; 14th-century
New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art
76%
The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine. c1340. Tempera with gold and silver leaf on panel
I see this to be working away from the “installation art” hodgepodge of the medieval sensibility, towards a sort of pictorial coherence. That's probably bad teleology allowed by the notion of "pictures" which the last few hundred years has baked and hardened. Then again, look: the predelle are included in the overall pictorial space — they're painted in — and their figures share a floor; the double/triple structure of the primary scenes is echoed in the bottom "panels" (two pairs flanking a group of three); the woven border is both ornament and an aspect of the space Christ and Catherine inhabit. It seems that what, in slightly earlier art, had been the discrete elements of an ensemble are coagulating into something that's recognizably a painting. Either way, the result is more interesting than it is totally resolved: nothing quite floats atop the gold in the way the best of Sienese figuration does. (2024)